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Altair Semiconductor announced commercial availability of a new TD-LTE reference design for use in dongles, data cards, consumer premise equipment and mobile handheld devices.

The reference design features Altair’s FourGee 3100/6200 chipset and supports spectrum bands that encompass India’s recently auction TD-LTE band 40, China’s band 38 and a number of other bands where TD-LTE might make its appearance in Japan, North America and Europe, the company said. The reference design features a unified TDD/FDD architecture using a single chipset and a single software stack, enabling a small form factor and cost efficient integration for multimode devices, Altair said.

“The demand for TD-LTE products, mainly in emerging markets such as India and China, is rapidly increasing, forcing carriers to develop cost-effective solutions for this growing segment,” Eran Eshed, Altair’s co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development said in a statement. “Thanks to the maturity of Altair’s FD-LTE solution which had sampled in September 2009, and the extensive testing it had undergone with most tier one infrastructure vendors, releasing a TD-LTE version was a logical next step for us.”

Altair recently announced a partnership with IPWireless to develop a suite of multi-band LTE modem products that will support key frequency bands ideally suited to global LTE deployments. The companies will integrate Altair’s cutting-edge software-defined radio baseband processor into IPWireless’ LTE devices. The first consumer-friendly LTE USB modem device will support multiple frequency bands including the 800MHz digital dividend band, 1800 MHz and TD-LTE’s 2.5 GHz. Subsequent devices will also support the entire US 700MHz and AWS frequency.